The Socialism Thread

[poblequadrat]

have any of you spent any length of time in a country like Denmark & to a lesser extent France?

 

rather than use a model like Cuba for health/efficiency, Denmark is a beacon of a modern mixed economy, which would prob be conceived as borderline communism by some here

 

go there, let the culture & high income tax & quality infra-structure show you a different path.....

 

the problem is social-democratic states have to be always carefully counter-balancing the harmful tendencies of liberalism, so they often reach a point where they can't cope with it anymore or fall into stagnation (although iirc David Harvey claims in his Brief History of Neoliberalism that for example South Korea didn't initially pay much attention to the IMF and that that was beneficial to their economy.) at any rate, having a capitalist class is having the enemy at home - they will always be pushing to destabilise the welfare state and, from what we've seen, have the resources to eventually win. liberalism should be eschewed entirely - there should of course be some independence when it comes to the organisation of labour, but just some (for example to me the idea that employment and HR should be in private hands is utterly absurd, since most states supposedly guarantee the right to a job, and most states supposedly regulate working conditions), and the abolition of capital, the marchandise and wage labour need to be on the horizon. we need to eventually have an economy that stagnates when we aren't getting better working conditions, more welfare and more power to workers, not one that stagnates when rampant speculation and absurd growth at the expense of workers stops.

 

it should be said, though, that just undoing the stupid things liberalism has done to cities and providing adequate council housing for everyone would be enough to have a booming construction industry for a few years, and the same goes for reindustrialisation and bringing back agriculture in the first world. there are opportunities to be had if the state steers the economy away from financial capital (the problem being that it went there in the first place for a reason, but oh well).

 

but yes, even Southern European welfare is great, or used to be at least

Edited September 27, 2015 by poblequadrat

[poblequadrat]

i think my previous post is unclear so i'll clarify:

 

1) social-democracy can't be a class compromise if it wants to last in the long term - the sad degradation and demise of european social-democracy is something that will repeat itself if we follow the same path

2) i think that right now, social-democracy looks like it would be beneficial to the economy as it is, but in the long term it is at odds with some core mechanics of liberalism

[coax]

The problem for me is that sounds kind of backwards. Creating capital isn't bad and it enables creation of new technology. It moves labor from one thing to another, hopefully one day abolishing it to a large degree. Why spend millions of man hours on agriculture and labor rather than focusing on the underlying system? Your ideas are compassionate but I'm not sure they are forward looking enough. Doing simple manual things for years just to enable workers sounds kind of useless

[LimpyLoo]

The problem for me is that sounds kind of backwards. Creating capital isn't bad and it enables creation of new technology. It moves labor from one thing to another, hopefully one day abolishing it to a large degree. Why spend millions of man hours on agriculture and labor rather than focusing on the underlying system? Your ideas are compassionate but I'm not sure they are forward looking enough. Doing simple manual things for years just to enable workers sounds kind of useless

Again, technology doesn't inherently benefit workers.

Did conveyor belts raise wages or shorten the work week by even a millisecond?

Tecnology won't abolish labor--

Or even put a tiny dent in it--

Unless the workers happen to own the joint.

[coax]

 

Again, technology doesn't inherently benefit workers.

Did conveyor belts raise wages or shorten the work week by even a millisecond?

Tecnology won't abolish labor--

Or even put a tiny dent in it--

Unless the workers happen to own the joint.

 

 

Technology doesn't inherently benefit workers, but in the modern economy, only technology can bring work while still having innovation. To bring back the old industries seems like a waste of potential, unless it is literally impossible to create technology that will benefit workers somehow. That's one reason why there's so much focus on education, it's all about creating new markets not only supporting or fitting existing ones. Which is why worker owned places may not necessarily lead anywhere when a decision can't be made or new technology can't be designed in an intelligent way to get progress. I use that word cautiously, but to me technology is everything in society- cars, clothes, electronics, medicine, media / entertainment both hardware and software, buildings etc etc. There will always be efficiency created and over a long enough timeline, especially now with all this cognitive computing stuff and robotics and everything else, technology /could/ abolish labor, eventually. There's a lot of room for automation right now like in fast food and self checkout and whatever. Foxxconn is starting to replace their chinese workers with robots as well.

 

What I was thinking of earlier was specially designed technology, like the increased abstraction of programming language and software in general, that enables a larger portion of people to do those things. The same thing could potentially happen in other sectors. You still sort of need the technology base otherwise it seems all stagnation

[poblequadrat]

automation is awesome as is the abolition of the division of labour (if you know what that means - not that everyone knows everything, but that everyone does what they can, rather than trying to "find a job") and generally working less. that's a core tenet of marxism - lenin said in the state and revolution that he loved banks and corporations because they can be managed by simply making lists and taking care of databases, which more or less anyone can do without much effort at all. i'm pretty much for that.

 

what i mean is that we're squandering our workforce and our natural resources - we could be producing lots of stuff, or at least everything we need, for little effort and close to home, but we prefer to have huge industrial complexes churning out ludicrous amounts of stuff in faraway countries, while we build ugly, overpriced semis on our arable land and tear down our historic industrial districts to build stuff for tourist/gentrification bubbles that won't last and will leave us empty-handed. for me that's what is backwards - i think deindustrialisation actually made the first world backwards.

 

also, just because manual labour happens in china doesn't mean that it isn't there, so i think it's a good thing to have it close to home and under the direction of socialism so that we don't have rely on fucking people over to have basic amenities, and so that all the intellectual labour goes towards making production easier.

 

in the long term you can have industrial countries and non-industrial countries and have everyone be happy, but that's simply not feasible right now because you don't magically stop having to buy from china just because you changed your government, although obviously you can't be an autocracy

 

as for technology, it's just a form of value so it isn't good or bad, it depends on who is using it. basically value comes from labour time and natural resources, multiplied by technology. creating it is neutral, but the moment you're extracting surplus from it and turning it into capital then it's basically a mass swindle, so while creating value can be good or bad, creating capital is a bad thing (in marxist terminology anyway). so, creating value yes, but what for?

 

but i think socialism is similar to capitalism in some ways, really. the urge to innovate is there.

 

ps. i don't know where you're from but i come from a heavily deindustrialised metro area that went from actually being creative to being labelled as creative, producing nothing and having close to 25% unemployment. but now we're trendy and desirable rather than grey and scary, yay.

Edited September 27, 2015 by poblequadrat

[LimpyLoo]

 

Again, technology doesn't inherently benefit workers.

Did conveyor belts raise wages or shorten the work week by even a millisecond?

Tecnology won't abolish labor--

Or even put a tiny dent in it--

Unless the workers happen to own the joint.

 

Technology doesn't inherently benefit workers, but in the modern economy, only technology can bring work while still having innovation. To bring back the old industries seems like a waste of potential, unless it is literally impossible to create technology that will benefit workers somehow. That's one reason why there's so much focus on education, it's all about creating new markets not only supporting or fitting existing ones. Which is why worker owned places may not necessarily lead anywhere when a decision can't be made or new technology can't be designed in an intelligent way to get progress. I use that word cautiously, but to me technology is everything in society- cars, clothes, electronics, medicine, media / entertainment both hardware and software, buildings etc etc. There will always be efficiency created and over a long enough timeline, especially now with all this cognitive computing stuff and robotics and everything else, technology /could/ abolish labor, eventually. There's a lot of room for automation right now like in fast food and self checkout and whatever. Foxxconn is starting to replace their chinese workers with robots as well.

 

What I was thinking of earlier was specially designed technology, like the increased abstraction of programming language and software in general, that enables a larger portion of people to do those things. The same thing could potentially happen in other sectors. You still sort of need the technology base otherwise it seems all stagnation

But again, technology won't abolish labor on its own.

 

If we find ourselves living in the anarchy-capitalist's dream society

when perfect, cheap automation comes about

Then do you think Walmart is gonna just say

"Your labor isn't needed anymore

So just swing by every Friday to pick up your normal paycheck"...?

 

This is why historically all the optimistic futurist predictions failed

They assumed that advances would magically benefit everyone

[coax]

automation is awesome as is the abolition of the division of labour (if you know what that means - not that everyone knows everything, but that everyone does what they can, rather than trying to "find a job") and generally working less. that's a core tenet of marxism - lenin said in the state and revolution that he loved banks and corporations because they can be managed by simply making lists and taking care of databases, which more or less anyone can do without much effort at all. i'm pretty much for that.

 

what i mean is that we're squandering our workforce and our natural resources - we could be producing lots of stuff, or at least everything we need, for little effort and close to home, but we prefer to have huge industrial complexes churning out ludicrous amounts of stuff in faraway countries, while we build ugly, overpriced semis on our arable land and tear down our historic industrial districts to build stuff for tourist/gentrification bubbles that won't last and will leave us empty-handed. for me that's what is backwards - i think deindustrialisation actually made the first world backwards.

 

also, just because manual labour happens in china doesn't mean that it isn't there, so i think it's a good thing to have it close to home and under the direction of socialism so that we don't have rely on fucking people over to have basic amenities, and so that all the intellectual labour goes towards making production easier.

 

in the long term you can have industrial countries and non-industrial countries and have everyone be happy, but that's simply not feasible right now because you don't magically stop having to buy from china just because you changed your government, although obviously you can't be an autocracy

 

as for technology, it's just a form of value so it isn't good or bad, it depends on who is using it. basically value comes from labour time and natural resources, multiplied by technology. creating it is neutral, but the moment you're extracting surplus from it and turning it into capital then it's basically a mass swindle, so while creating value can be good or bad, creating capital is a bad thing (in marxist terminology anyway). so, creating value yes, but what for?

 

but i think socialism is similar to capitalism in some ways, really. the urge to innovate is there.

 

ps. i don't know where you're from but i come from a heavily deindustrialised metro area that went from actually being creative to being labelled as creative, producing nothing and having close to 25% unemployment. but now we're trendy and desirable rather than grey and scary, yay.

 

I can agree with what you said about industrial pipeline and so forth but I have to say from what I've heard creation of capital is one of the great things that enables modern society. Without capital creation, you end up having millions of people doing the same work over and over without ever 'capitalizing' on it so to speak. Like in poor countries they can do a lot of work but they don't spend it creating capital they spend it maintaining their pipeline of labor. So I'm not sure why it's a mass swindle. I think right now it's pretty bad, when you have a few owning so much of the capital and so many not owning any, but it's not in itself a problem with capital, it's a problem of types of technology and ideas and implementation seems to me.

 

Right now it seems like a lot of capital and technology has been created, culture is more consumption based than production based, and it leads to a decline in the culture as well, leading to difficulties migrating to and creating new markets. But somewhere in there, I see a faint solution which I wrote about earlier.

 

Also value can be reformed to say simply 'technology', and then natural resources and labor is what powers it. But technology can power both natural resources AND labor, so there is a strange loop there. My basic idea was to focus on technology, and not on labor. While you seem to be focusing on labor, and then have technology bend to its will. To me we are more than labor, we are an endless sea of possibilities due to our brains, and our brains can do all kinds of stuff, but we're limited by our technology. I don't know if it goes too far, I'm not sure if it's realistic, but there are traces of it everywhere. It also depends on how far you define labor and what kind of innovation would be possible

[coax]

 

But again, technology won't abolish labor on its own.

 

If we find ourselves living in the anarchy-capitalist's dream society

when perfect, cheap automation comes about

Then do you think Walmart is gonna just say

"Your labor isn't needed anymore

So just swing by every Friday to pick up your normal paycheck"...?

 

This is why historically all the optimistic futurist predictions failed

They assumed that advances would magically benefit everyone

 

 

I'm not an anarcho-capitalist just to have that said. I agree with you in general. Simply pushing forward and not taking into account transition or creation of opportunities will just lead to a nightmare like scenario you allude to.

 

The problem is, advances are the only thing we have! is it not. Without it, it's just whatever works, sounds like stagnation. No new pcs, no new media, no new <whatever> iphone. These things are the basis of intellectual and emotional fulfilment, the creation of culture and momentum. Without it we are just working and not creating new things. So the question is how to intellegently design and produce advances that can benefit everyone, and how to inform and educate and enable everyone to be a part of it, etc.

Edited September 27, 2015 by coax

[LimpyLoo]

 

But again, technology won't abolish labor on its own.

If we find ourselves living in the anarchy-capitalist's dream society

when perfect, cheap automation comes about

Then do you think Walmart is gonna just say

"Your labor isn't needed anymore

So just swing by every Friday to pick up your normal paycheck"...?

This is why historically all the optimistic futurist predictions failed

They assumed that advances would magically benefit everyone

 

I'm not an anarcho-capitalist just to have that said. I agree with you in general. Simply pushing forward and not taking into account transition or creation of opportunities will just lead to a nightmare like scenario you allude to.

 

The problem is, advances are the only thing we have! is it not. Without it, it's just whatever works, sounds like stagnation. No new pcs, no new media, no new <whatever> iphone. These things are the basis of intellectual and emotional fulfilment, the creation of culture and momentum. Without it we are just working and not creating new things. So the question is how to intellegently design and produce advances that can benefit everyone, and how to inform and educate and enable everyone to be a part of it, etc.

I was just saying that abolishing labor is a political issue, not a technological one

[cwmbrancity]

after the impeccably high standard of that particular sunday roast i feel unable to offer anything coherent to this debate

 

pass the Burgundy, its 1 of those 3 times-a year-nights when alcohol can take a strut in the house

[drillkicker]

bernie is saying he's a socialist. wondering if that will doom him and give trump the apocalypse wheel.

 

i see your point, hard to disagree with.

 

the republicans have been using socialist as a slur against obama, not sure how bernie plans to win a general election proudly claiming to be a socialist.

Hasn't he identified as a socialist for his entire political career? I remember seeing him in a Michael Moor film talking about socialism, and that was years before anyone outside Vermont cared about him.

[caze]

the thing is marx

1) didn't have to predict technological advances because that isn't what he set out to do, although it should be noted Engels did own a factory and thus was well-versed in how to produce more for less

2) did take them into account - see the fragment on what he even calls the "fundamental law of capitalism" (ie. that capitalism always needs a reserve of unemployable people and that such reserve will always grow as long as capitalism exists), or the fragment on machines, etc. marx's understanding of capitalism doesn't differ that much from the classical economics that liberalism is built on - in fact that's where the marxist theory of value comes from, he just views such economy as a historical phenomenon with internal contradictions that came to be and will come to pass, rather than as a scientific law. capital volume one is as valid as liberal economics, because they talk about the same thing really.

1) He did have to, because the technological advances that came along invalidated his assumptions.

2) No he didn't. Attempts at generating fundamental laws for capitalism are fundamentally flawed, that one you mention is not true for a start, and neither is his theory of value. Piketty recently has tried to come up with some new ones, also nonsense. Whether his understanding of capitalism was the same as that of most classical liberals isn't particularly relevant (and it certainly wasn't), as most economists are bullshit artists, whether they're Marxist, Keynesian, classical liberal or libertarian. Economies are simply too complicated (and provably so, due to the nature of nonlinear mathematics) to successfully model with any great predictive power.

 

also marx didn't really make economic "predictions" - he made economic analyses that for the most part do hold, and political predictions that were pretty much always wrong (although he was particularly interested in Russia at the end of his life!). you must also specify which marx you're talking about, because he radically changed his views as the XIXth century developed.

 

I'd disagree that any of his analyses hold, and he did make economic predictions, his most glaring failure was to predict workers wages would be inevitably squeezed downwards.

I'm well aware Marx's views changed over time, but they didn't change that much. They basically went from "the collapse of capitalism is inevitable and the revolution is around the corner" to "either the collapse will happen soon enough, followed by revolution, or we'll enter a period of capitalistic barbarism", of course neither has happened.

i didn't even mention marx ffs

Sorry, I thought this was the socialism thread.

Edited September 29, 2015 by caze

[caze]

What happens though if they can't figure out AI or possibly worse than that, they figure out some type of intelligence but it's a less diverse and more controlled type of commercialized intelligence leading to a general decline in the imagination and acting power of the population? Or we could end up with a collapse and then we find out we're really alone and no-one can save us but ourselves - back to square one. This planet and humans is kind of like a campfire, it needs constant new wood to burn and the default situation is for there to be no fire.

 

This is probably way too pessimistic for me, but I'm having extreme difficulty trying to imagine what 50-100 years from now will look like.

 

I wasn't even talking about AI there, even without AI we should relatively shortly be entering a post-industrialized world (the only requirement for which is the value of energy to crash, it becomes inevitable after that that resources and industry become incapable of creating value).

 

You're right though that when we factor different possible AIs into the mix can't make firm predictions about what will happen, good or bad. I don't see any good evidence for pessimism on that front though either, there are just as many optimistic speculations one could make.

[caze]

also, it's a global economy. saying we're a "post-industrial" society when we rely on mexican maquilas, chinese industrial estates and south asian sweatshops for even the most basic stuff is a fucking joke

 

I never said we were living in a post-industrial world, though certain nations are already there, it's a simple definition - the value generated from services is greater than the value generated from industrial production, but technological advances should relatively quickly finish the job off world-wide.

[poblequadrat]

 

also, it's a global economy. saying we're a "post-industrial" society when we rely on mexican maquilas, chinese industrial estates and south asian sweatshops for even the most basic stuff is a fucking joke

 

I never said we were living in a post-industrial world, though certain nations are already there, it's a simple definition - the value generated from services is greater than the value generated from industrial production, but technological advances should relatively quickly finish the job off world-wide.

 

 

the volume of value is not what defines a mode of production, though

if you're the kind of marxist that is fine with the concept of mode of production, anyway

[caze]

As I've said already Marxist conceptions of value are nonsense (it's almost entirely subjective), his idea of a mode of production also has no relevance to the modern world. Once everyone decides that something has no value, then it ceases to become important - it's just something that is there, it'll be taken for granted. Information is already almost entirely valueless in that sense (despite what will be ultimately futile attempts to retain information scarcity - copyright, etc.), once energy follows suite resources won't be far behind.

[LimpyLoo]

As I've said already Marxist conceptions of value are nonsense (it's almost entirely subjective), his idea of a mode of production also has no relevance to the modern world. Once everyone decides that something has no value, then it ceases to become important - it's just something that is there, it'll be taken for granted. Information is already almost entirely valueless in that sense (despite what will be ultimately futile attempts to retain information scarcity - copyright, etc.), once energy follows suite resources won't be far behind.

While value might be 'subjective'

It's subjective in the sense that having a headache is subjective

not in the sense that I 'decide' whether it has value or not

 

Value is a brute economic fact

How things acquire value or to whom doesn't make the term meaningless

 

A banana is infinitely more valuable to someone starving to death

Than it is to (say) me

While that value is 'subjective' in some basic colloquial sense

The banana's value is not up for debate

It doesn't change based on opinions

It is a brute economic fact

 

Some value is based on consensus

Some value is hard to determine

But again, it doesn't matter how or why something has value

Or even whether people recognize value or not

Value is simply a brute fact

[caze]

While value might be 'subjective'

It's subjective in the sense that having a headache is subjective

not in the sense that I 'decide' whether it has value or not

 

Value is a brute economic fact

How things acquire value or to whom doesn't make the term meaningless

 

A banana is infinitely more valuable to someone starving to death

Than it is to (say) me

While that value is 'subjective' in some basic colloquial sense

The banana's value is not up for debate

It doesn't change based on opinions

It is a brute economic fact

 

Some value is based on consensus

Some value is hard to determine

But again, it doesn't matter how or why something has value

Or even whether people recognize value or not

Value is simply a brute fact

 

I just meant subjective in contrast to Marx's objective sense in his labour theory of value. If we want to get really metaphysical I don't really believe in subjectivity at a fundamental level at all.

[poblequadrat]

As I've said already Marxist conceptions of value are nonsense (it's almost entirely subjective), his idea of a mode of production also has no relevance to the modern world. Once everyone decides that something has no value, then it ceases to become important - it's just something that is there, it'll be taken for granted. Information is already almost entirely valueless in that sense (despite what will be ultimately futile attempts to retain information scarcity - copyright, etc.), once energy follows suite resources won't be far behind.

 

personally i find it very strange to use italian marxist arguments to claim that marx is full of shit

you basically sound like antonio negri when he claims communism is already here, but whatever

 

but at any rate I disagree - information is labour multiplied by technology and someone somewhere has an use for it, so it has a value. the fact that it's relatively hard to sell certain types of information is a contradiction that can potentially lead somewhere but as of 2015 the relations of production are largely identical to the ones in place 100 years ago, so we're still in the same mode of production until wage labour becomes something else and value doesn't circulate under the merchandise form

Edited September 30, 2015 by poblequadrat

[caze]

personally i find it very strange to use italian marxist arguments to claim that marx is full of shit

you basically sound like antonio negri when he claims communism is already here, but whatever

 

I'm not. There have been many people, of all political and philosophical stripes who have pointed out these flaws.

 

but at any rate I disagree - information is labour multiplied by technology and someone somewhere has an use for it, so it has a value. the fact that it's relatively hard to sell certain types of information is a contradiction that can potentially lead somewhere but as of 2015 the relations of production are largely identical to the ones in place 100 years ago, so we're still in the same mode of production until wage labour becomes something else and value doesn't circulate under the merchandise form

 

Adding 'multiplied by technology' is just a weasely move. in some limited sense it might be correct (if you want to reduce it to maths, the value for 'labour' would be tiny), but it's not the prime determinant any more, and hasn't been for some time (it wasn't even in Marx's time in many cases - the data he drew on to form his conclusions was fairly limited). To say the relations of production are largely identical to a hundred years ago is frankly laughable.

Edited September 30, 2015 by caze

[poblequadrat]

 

personally i find it very strange to use italian marxist arguments to claim that marx is full of shit

you basically sound like antonio negri when he claims communism is already here, but whatever

 

I'm not. There have been many people, of all political and philosophical stripes who have pointed out these flaws.

 

but at any rate I disagree - information is labour multiplied by technology and someone somewhere has an use for it, so it has a value. the fact that it's relatively hard to sell certain types of information is a contradiction that can potentially lead somewhere but as of 2015 the relations of production are largely identical to the ones in place 100 years ago, so we're still in the same mode of production until wage labour becomes something else and value doesn't circulate under the merchandise form

 

Adding 'multiplied by technology' is just a weasely move. in some limited sense it might be correct (if you want to reduce it to maths, the value for 'labour' would be tiny), but it's not the prime determinant any more, and hasn't been for some time (it wasn't even in Marx's time in many cases - the data he drew on to form his conclusions was fairly limited). To say the relations of production are largely identical to a hundred years ago is frankly laughable.

 

 

what i mean is that you aren't pointing out any flaws, you're claiming that the relations of production are becoming communistic due to the prominence of immaterial labour

 

which isn't true, but is not an anti-marxist argument at all, rather a point that marx himself made in the single most famous section of the Grundrisse

 

"multiplied by technology" isn't a weasely move - a worker with a machine produces more than a worker without a machine, same as a specialised worker when opposed to unskilled labour. marx even literally used the word "multiplied" a few times iirc. i think i'm beginning to get slightly frustrated with this conversation because this is economics 101 and i sometimes get the slight impression that you might not have done your homework

 

there's nothing laughable about saying the relations of production in 2015 can be described in terms of wage labour, the merchandise, commodity fetishism, etc. there's literally nothing new about the general mechanism of present-day capitalism. i don't know how you can argue against this - you probably have a job yourself, so how can you say otherwise? simply baffling

[poblequadrat]

btw, socialism isn't necessarily marxist, and marxism is a political tradition that goes beyond marx and into political (not economic) practices that bear little relation to him

 

so could we please discuss socialism plz?

Edited September 30, 2015 by poblequadrat

[caze]

what i mean is that you aren't pointing out any flaws, you're claiming that the relations of production are becoming communistic due to the prominence of immaterial labour

 

No I'm not, not sure I can engage with you on the other shit if that's what you got out of what I've written already..

[chenGOD]

Anyone who thinks Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production is full of shit, is likely full of shit themselves.

 

Marx's analysis of how the capitalist mode of production works is pretty accurate, imo (and of several others) the one thing he failed to take into account was the adaptability of capitalism to meet the political economy in which it was situated.

 

Also information is the most valuable commodity that ever was and ever will be. And I'm not talking about patents or copyright. I'm talking about knowing how to exploit the information asymmetry that is present in all markets.

 

Finally, poblequadrat is right to bring it back on topic - Marxism is not socialism (and though it is political to a degree, he also failed to create a set of ideas that defined international relations, so it does have limitations in describing the world now).

 

For anyone interested in understanding more about Marx - Robert Heilbroner probably does the best job of explaining him. "The Worldly Philosophers" and "Marxism: For and Against" are what I would recommend.